Developing 'FLOSS' - A Market Driven Investment: First Evidence from a Francophone Companies Survey

Over the last few years, FLOSS (""Free Libre Open Source Software"") has become a commercially viable reality of the first order. It is viewed as an extreme case of open innovation (Chesbrough, 2003), and thus of a laboratory for analysing innovation production in Internet based/knowledge based industries.

It the FLOSS field an increasing number of companies are getting involved in the communities of development (Lakhani & Wolf 2005). Scholars (see, for instance Dahlander & Wallin 2006) has analysed this as a way to control a complementary asset, without owning it (as defined by Teece 1986, Teece & al. 1997). In this article, we defend the idea that involvement can be of different intensity, from complementary to specific asset, and that this intensity depends of the market of the firm.

To do so, we surveyed francophone companies (France, Belgium, Switzerland) affirming a utilization of FLOSS in their commercial activity. Based on roughly 500 companies concerned, we obtained 141 usable responses and, via an ascendant hierarchical clustering (AHC) we statistically verified a link between FLOSS commercial strategies and degree of involvement into communities. We propose a typology of commercial strategies explaining this differences in involvement.